He played Hamlet, it seemed, for a long time: King Hussein, the quintessential prince of indecision. His journey to Washington this week with Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is a break with his old reticence. It had to be this way, perhaps. He could not have been the first Arab leader to do and say in public, on Israeli- Palestinian matters, what these leaders knew and did and said in private. That role belonged to the daring and flamboyant ruler on the banks of the Nile, Anwar Sadat. Nor would Hussein be next. That deed would belong to Yassir Arafat. The cautious ruler east of the Jordan River waited until "treason" and "traitor" -- terms that had poisoned the political life of the Arab world -- were discarded by the very same men of the Palestine Liberation Organization who had flung such accusations at others.
The memory of the dead stalks the breakthrough between Israel and Jordan. King Abdullah, Hussein's grandfather, the founder of the Hashemite Kingdom, was the great pragmatist of his time. He paid for it, was made the sacrificial lamb for the Arab debacle in Palestine, when he was struck down bya Palestinian assassin at Al- Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in the summer of 1951. It was a terrible time of panic and shame. Abdullah was turned into a scapegoat for the flight of the Palestinian upper and middle classes from their land and for the incompetence of the larger Arab armies of Syria, Egypt and Iraq. When the end came for Abdullah, his grandson and political heir, Hussein, a young boy of 16, was by his grandfather's side.
Hemmed in. From the very beginning there had been in that fragile Hashemite realm, established by British power in 1921 (Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill bragged that he created Jordan on a Sunday afternoon; it actually took three days), a strong dose of pragmatism and moderation, a suspicion of the politics of the crowd and the street. An inheritor of the urbane culture of the polyglot Ottoman Empire, the world before the age of mass nationalism and mass hysteria, King Abdullah knew that the Jewish "national home" west of the Jordan River was there to stay. Hemmed in by the desert wilderness of Transjordan that was his realm, Abdullah was drawn across the river, pulled into the play for Palestine that unfolded between 1917 and Israel's statehood in 1948.
Schemes swirled in Abdullah's head. In one fantasy, he thought of a "Semitic Kingdom" on both banks of the Jordan: The Jews would have autonomy under his reign, Arab and Jew would live as equals. As early as 1926, he invited the Zionist leadership in Palestine to take part in the economic development of his barren country. A year later, Abdullah concluded a deal with a Russian-born engineer to build a hydroelectric power plant at the confluence of the Jordan and the Yarmuk rivers. In 1929, he granted concessions to another Jewish entrepreneur to set up a chemical plant on the Dead Sea. The great fantasies of today, of a "new Middle East" where tanks yield to banks and the scheme of a "Red-Dead Canal" (a canal between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea), have precursors in King Abdullah's ideas.
Abdullah had done well by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49: He secured the West Bank of the Jordan River and East Jerusalem. But his new Palestinian subjects -- those on the West Bank, the refugees who had flocked east -- owed him no love or loyalty. He bequeathed this entanglement to his grandson. The struggle for Palestine gave the Hashemites a stage to play upon -- and a deadly curse. They could neither bargain away the maximalist claims of the Palestinians nor turn their backs on Palestinian affairs. King Hussein now chooses the middle path yet again. He has stepped out of the way of the Palestinians, but he has kept Jordan in play.
Waves of Palestinians -- refugees from 1948, from 1967 and from the gulf war in 1990-91 -- have made Jordan a dual monarchy of sorts, Palestinians and East Bankers side by side. The Palestinian decision to go it alone with Israel has provided a sanction for the King's separate diplomacy.
Conventional wisdom has it that the pressure on the Syrians will grow intense now that the Jordanians and the Palestinians have stolen a march on them. True, the Syrians can no longer awe or intimidate other Arabs. But with a preponderant position in Lebanon and a willingness to unleash deeds of terror while still maintaining the fiction of its innocence, Syria has some cards to play.
When Henry Kissinger sought to negotiate a Syrian-Israeli disengagement on the Golan Heights after the October War of 1973, the sides haggled over increments of 100 meters, over every hill. Now Syria will have to decide on the kind of peace it can countenance in return for Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. That could take years. The "new landscape" in the Middle East has some old and stubborn patches in it. King Abdullah's pragmatic ways may have been vindicated, but we have not seen the last of those dark furies that struck him down.
